About the role

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Bank Infrastructure team at Pleo. This team builds and maintains the payment rails that power Pleo's money movement, integrating with banks and payment partners to handle inbound and outbound bank transfers reliably and at scale. You'll be working on some of the most critical systems at Pleo: the infrastructure that guarantees that each financial transaction, whether incoming, outgoing, or internal, is processed and settled with absolute accuracy, on time, and with the resilience to recover gracefully when things go wrong.

If you're excited by the challenge of building highly reliable financial systems and want to work in a culture that values transparency, collaboration, and engineering excellence, this role is for you.

What you’ll be doing

As a Senior Backend Engineer on Bank Infrastructure, you will:

• Design, build, and maintain integrations with banks and payment partners across multiple payment schemes (SEPA, Faster Payments, SWIFT, and others).
• Own the reliability and correctness of inbound and outbound payment flows, including reconciliation, settlement, and exception handling.
• Architect systems that are resilient to partner outages, network failures, and edge cases inherent in financial messaging.
• Lead initiatives to improve system observability, fault tolerance, and operational excellence across payment rails.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including compliance, finance operations, and product to evolve Pleo's payment capabilities.
• Participate in code reviews, post-mortems, and provide mentorship to other engineers.
• Proactively address technical debt and guide the team through technical challenges and migrations.

What you bring

You'll thrive in this role if you have:

• Hands-on experience building payment integrations, bank APIs, payment scheme integrations, or financial messaging formats (ISO 20022, SWIFT, SEPA, Faster Payments, or similar).
• Strong understanding of payment flows end-to-end: payment initiation, routing, reconciliation, settlement, and exception/failure handling.
• Experience designing and operating highly available, resilient distributed systems with robust error recovery and observability.
• Expertise in server-side development, ideally Kotlin or Java, with strong experience in microservices and distributed systems.
• Proficiency with relational databases (PostgreSQL), cloud environments (AWS, Kubernetes), and observability tooling (e.g. Grafana).
• Awareness of payment compliance and regulatory considerations (e.g. AML, sanctions screening, PSD2) is a plus.
• Understanding of safeguarding of customer funds and the impact of money movement pipelines.
• Strong problem-solving skills and experience owning production payment systems through incidents and operational complexity.
• High proficiency with AI-enhanced development tools (such as GitHub Copilot or Claude) as integrated partners for system design, documentation, and code generation.
• Willingness to deepen your AI fluency as Pleo scales AI adoption across engineering. We're building a culture where thoughtful AI use for delivery velocity and quality.
• Proven ability to structure complex engineering problems for AI collaboration, including writing precise specifications, validating generated outputs, and iterative development.
• A proactive drive to expand your AI fluency as we scale adoption to enhance delivery velocity and maintain high engineering quality across our organisation.
• A collaborative mindset and the ability to mentor and upskill teammates.